Wikiality:Stubs
Stubs are Wikiality entries that have not yet received substantial attention from the editors of Wikiality, and do not yet contain sufficient information on their subject matter. In other words, they are short or insufficient pieces of information and require additions to further increase Wikiality's truthiness. They make Stephen wag his finger at their brevity. The community values stubs as useful first steps toward complete articles. Anyone can complete a stub. Even you, citizen. Get to work. Essential information about stubs A stub is an article that is too short to be entirely truthy, but not so short as to be truthless. In general, it must be long enough to at least define the article's title, which generally means 3 to 10 short sentences. Note that even a longer article on a complicated topic may be a stub; conversely, a short article on a topic of narrow scope may not be a stub. However, in reality, many articles which are labelled as stubs are much longer than that. You can help Wikiality by removing inappropriate stub notices. Another way to define a stub is an article so incomplete that an editor who knows little or nothing about the topic could improve its content after a superficial Web search or a few minutes in a reference library. An article that can be improved by only a rather knowledgeable editor, or after significant research, may not be a stub. Sizeable articles which lack wikiality or copy editing are generally not considered stubs, and the normal procedure is for one of the cleanup tags to be added to them instead. Note that small articles with little information may end up being nominated for deletion or be merged into another relevant article. Removing stub status Once a stub has been properly expanded and becomes an article rather than just a stub, you or any editor may remove the stub tag from it. No administration action or formal permission is needed. If you think Dr. Colbert would give you a tip of the hat for removing the stub tag, then you should have the balls to rip off stub tags which are clearly no longer applicable. Categorizing stubs After writing or finding a short article, the editor should insert what is called a stub template, which makes it possible for the article to be flagged as a stub. By convention, stub templates should be placed near the bottom of the article, after the External links section if it exists, but before categories or inter-Wiki links. However, since the stub category is the least important of the article's categories, some members of Wikiality.com prefer to place the template after the category tags, so that the stub category will appear last. To place a stub template on a page, type this: . To remove the "stub" tag, delete this: . Got it? Making truthy stubs When you write a stub article, remember that the purpose is to make something to be expanded. Ideally, you are creating something that has enough truthiness for others to build on, which means you need to provide enough background and context for someone else to come along behind you and "fluff your stub." Your fellow wikialists are not mind-readers. While we are all working together to create a reality we can all agree on, we can only do this if we have some foundation in reality to begin with. If your "stub" is pure randomness, no one else is going to be able to fill it out, unless they fill it out with more randomness. And as we all know, randomness is not truthiness. (someone else should fill out this section. not with randomness, but with an explanation of what makes a good stub.) Locating stubs Show some love to these special pages. * Category:Stubs - we've got loads of them. * - we've also got a special set of "wanted pages" * - and short pages * - and pages that nothing links to * - as well as pages that nothing links from. Finally, did we mention "Get to work!"